STELLA loved the garden, even when autumn came and flowers were rare;
for still there was the gold and russet glory of the trees. Also the
garden was a bit of her Promised Land; the road beyond the gate ran into
the heart of the world. And the open air brought strength. On sunny days
her wheel-chair was brought down and set on a gravel path, and there,
wrapped in furs, she sat, generally alone save for the old hound always
on guard beside her. She read, and dreamed her innocent dreams, and
looked up at the ever-novel canopy of the sky, exulting quietly in her
freedom. Those around her knew her needs and gave her at such times the
familiar solitude which she craved.
“Don't be left alone, darling, a moment longer than you want,” said Lady
Blount. “Too much of that sort of thing is n't good for you.”
And Stella, trying to interpret herself, would reply, “I just want to
make friends with nature.”
“I wish I could understand you, dear, like Walter,” said Lady Blount.
“What exactly do you mean?”
Stella laughed, and said truthfully that she did not know. Perhaps, it
was that, the sea having taken her to its heart, she feared lest earth
might not be so kindly, and she sought conciliation. But such
flutterings of the spirit are not to be translated into words. A day or
two before she had driven through a glade of blazing beech, carpeted
deep brown, and the shadows twisted themselves into dim shapes, stealing
through the mystery of the slender trunks, and the longing to be left
alone among them and hear the message of the woodland had smitten her
like pain.
One morning she sat warmly wrapped up, a fur toque on her head, in the
pale autumn sunshine, with Constable by her side, when a draggled-tailed
woman, carrying a draggled-bodied infant, paused by the front gate,
taking stock of the place in the tramp's furtive way; and, spying the
gracious figure of the girl at a turn of the gravel path, walked boldly
in. Before she had advanced half-way, Constable, hidden by Stella's
chair, rose to his feet, his ears cocked, and growled threateningly. The
woman came to a scared halt. Stella looked up and saw her. Quickly she
laid her hand on the dog's head, and rated him for a silly fellow and
bade him lie down and not move till she gave the order. Constable, like
an old dog who knew his place, but felt bound to protest, grumblingly
obeyed. He had lived for eleven years under the fixed conviction that
though female tramps with babies were permitted by some grotesque
authority to wander on sufferance along the road, they could enter the
gates of the Channel House only under penalty of instant annihilation.
His goddess, however, through some extraordinary caprice ordaining them
to live, the matter was taken out of his hands. Let them live, then, and
see what came of it. It was beyond his comprehension.
“Don't be afraid,” cried Stella in her clear voice. “The dog won't hurt
you.”
“Sure, Miss?”
“Quite sure.” She smiled bountiful assurance. The draggled-tailed woman
approached. “What do you want?”
The woman, battered, dirty, and voluble, began the tramp's tale. She had
started from Dover and was bound for Plymouth, where she was to meet her
husband, a sailor, whose ship would arrive to-morrow. What she had been
doing in Dover, except that she had been in 'orspital (which did not
account for the child's movements), she did not state. But she had
slept under hedges since she had started, and had no money, and a kind
gentleman, Gawd bless him! had given her a hunk of bread and cheese
the day before, and that was all the food they had had for twenty-four
hours.
As she talked, Stella's unaccustomed eyes gradually took in the
scarecrow details of her person: the blowzy hat, with its broken
feathers; the greasy ropes of hair; the unclean rags of raiment; the
broken and shapeless boots; the huddled defilement of the staring,
unwholesome child; and she began to tremble through all her body. For
a while the sense of sight was so overwhelming in its demands that she
lost the sense of hearing. What was this creature of loathsome ugliness
doing in her world of beauty? To what race did she belong? From what
planet had she fallen? For what eccentric reason did she choose to
present this repulsive aspect to mankind?
At last, when her sight was more or less familiarized with the spectacle
of squalor, the significance of the woman's words came to her as to one
awaking from a dream.
“Not a bit of food has passed my lips since yesterday at twelve o'clock,
Miss, and Gawd strike me dead, Miss, if I ain't telling the blessed
truth.”
“But why have n't you bought food?” asked Stella.
The woman stared at her. How could she understand Stellamaris?
“I have n't a penny in the world, Miss. The day afore yesterday a lady
give me twopence, and I spent it in milk for the child. S'welp me, I
did, Miss.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” said Stella, whose face had grown tense and
white, “that it's impossible for you to get food for yourself and your
baby?”
“Indeed I do, Miss.”
“That the two of you might die of starvation?”
“We 're a-dying of it now, Miss,” said the woman.
God knows that she lied. The tramp's life is not a path of roses, and it
is not one suitable for the rearing of tender babes, and the fact of its
possibility is a blot on our civilization; but the hard-bitten vagabond
of the highroad has his or her well-defined means of livelihood. This
was a mistress of mumpery.
She had passed the night in the comfortable casual ward of a workhouse
five miles away, and had slept the dead sleep of the animal, and she and
her baby had started the day with a coarse, though sustaining, meal. She
was wandering on and on, aimlessly from workhouse to workhouse, as
she had wandered from infancy, begging a sixpence here, and a plate of
victuals there, impeded in her stray-cat freedom only by the brat in
her arms, yet fiercely fond of it and regardful of its needs. She was
a phenomenon that in our civilization ought not to exist. She was
acquainted with hunger and thirst and privation; she was anything of
misery that you like to describe; but she was not dying or likely to die
of starvation.
The sociology of the tramp, however, was leagues outside the knowledge
of Stellamaris. She looked at the woman in awful horror until her
delicate face seemed to fade into a pair of great God-filled eyes.
“And you have no roof to shelter you from the cold and rain?”
After the manner of her kind the woman assured her that such was the
fact. She put her head on one side, wheedling in the time-honoured way.
“If you would help a poor woman with a shilling or two, kind lady--”
“A shilling or two?” Stella's voice broke into a cracked falsetto.
“You shall have pounds and pounds. I 'll see that you don't die of
starvation. I have no money to give you,--I've scarcely ever seen
any,--but I have thousands of pounds in the house, and you shall have
them all. If I could only walk, I would ask some one to fetch them to
you. But I can't walk. I've never been able to walk all my life. You
see, I 'm tied here till my maid comes for me. What can I do?” She wrung
her hands, desperately, stirred to the roots of her being.
“Never walked?” said the woman, taken aback, the elementary human fact
appealing more to her dulled senses than the phantasmagorical promise of
wealth. “Lor'! Poor young lady! I 'd sooner be as I am, Miss, than not
be able to walk. And such a sweet young lady!” Then the gleam of the
divine being spent, she said, “Can't you call anybody, Miss?”
But there was no need to call anybody; for one of the maids, having
caught sight of the intruder through a window of the house, came flying
down the path, a protecting flutter of apron-strings.
“What do you mean by coming in here? Go away at once! We have nothing to
do with tramps. Be off with you!”
She was breathless, excited, indignant.
“Hold your tongue, Mary!” cried Stella in a tone so unfamiliar that it
petrified the simple maid. “How dare you interfere between me and the
person I am talking to?” It must be remembered that Stella was of mortal
clay. She had her faults, like the rest of us. She was born and bred
a princess, an autocrat, a despot, a tyrant. And here was one of the
white-hot moments of life when the princess was the princess and the
tyrant the tyrant. The new commotion brought the old dog again to his
feet. For the only time in her life she struck him in anger, though
physically he felt it as much as the fall of an autumn leaf.
“Down, Constable, down!” And turning to the maid: “Wheel my chair into
the drawing-room and ask Lady Blount to come to me. You follow us!” she
commanded the tramp.
The bewildered Mary obeyed. The procession was formed: Stella, in her
chair; Mary; Constable, head down, wondering like an old dog at the
queer, newfangled ways of the world; and the bedraggled woman, with her
pallid and staring baby.
The chair was wheeled across the threshold of the drawing-room. The
tramp paused irresolute. Bidden to enter and sit down, she chose a
straight-backed chair near the door. Mary sped to fetch her mistress
to deal with the appalling situation. In a moment or two Lady Blount
hurried in. The woman rose and sketched a vague curtsy.
Lady Blount began:
“My darling Stella--”
But Stella checked her, stretching out passionate hands.
“Aunt Julia, give me two or three thousand pounds at once, please,
please!”
“My dear, what for?” asked the amazed lady.
“To give to this poor woman. She and her baby are dying of starvation.
They are dressed in rags. They have no home. It 's dreadful, horrible!
Can you conceive it?”
Lady Blount turned to the woman.
“Go round to the kitchen entrance, and they will give you some food. I
'll see you myself later.”
The woman thanked her and blessed her, and disappeared.
“My dearest,” said Lady Blount, gently, “you can't give such people vast
sums of money.”
“Why not? She has none. We have a lot. How can we live in comfort when
she and her baby are wandering about penniless. They will die. Don't you
understand? They will die.”
“We can't provide for them for the rest of their lives, dear.”
“But we must,” she cried. “How can you be so cruel?”
“Cruel? My dearest, if I give her a plate of food, and some milk for the
baby, and send her away with a shilling, she will be hugely delighted. A
woman like that is not a very deserving object for charity.”
Stella's bosom rose and fell, and she regarded Lady Blount in sudden,
awful surmise.
“Auntie darling, what do you mean? Why are n't you horrified?”
“She's only a tramp. Neither she nor the baby is going to die of
starvation. And, darling, you must n't let folks like that come near
you. Goodness knows what horrible diseases they may be suffering from.”
“But that makes it all the worse. If she is ill, we must help her to get
well.”
“My poor innocent lamb,” said Lady Blount, “there are thousands like
her. They are the dregs of our civilization. We could n't possibly
keep them all in luxury, could we? Now, don't be distressed, dear,” she
added, bending down and kissing the girl's cheek.
“I 'll go and have a word with the woman. I 'll treat her quite
generously, for your sake, you may be assured.”
She smiled, and went out of the room, leaving Stella crushed beneath an
avalanche of knowledge. Filthy, starving shreds of humanity were common
objects in the beautiful world--so common as to arouse little or no
compassion in the hearts of kind women like the maid Mary and her
Aunt Julia. All they had thought of was of her, Stella, her danger
and possible contamination. Toward the woman they were callous, almost
cruel. What did it mean? Her chivalrous anger died down; reaction came.
She looked about her beautiful world piteously, and then for the first
time in her life she wept tears of bitter sorrow.
They told her afterward of the tramp's wayward, wandering life, of the
various charities that existed for the regeneration of such people, of
the free hospitals for the sick, of the workhouse system, and they
gave her John Risca's famous little book to read. Eventually she was
convinced that it was quixotic folly to bestow a fortune on the first
beggar that came along, and she acquitted her aunt of cruelty. But a
cloud hung heavy for a long time over her spirits, and a stain soiled
the beauty of the garden, so that it never more was the perfect
paradise. And, henceforward, when she drove through the streets of the
great watering-place near by, and through the villages which still held
something of their summer enchantment, her eyes were opened to sights of
sorrow and pain to which they had been happily blind before.
Winter came, and the routine of her life went on, despite revolutionary
changes of habit. Her heart had learned not to be affected by the
transition from the prone to the sitting posture. No longer did
beholders realize her as nothing but a head and neck and graceful arms,
and no longer was a dressing-jacket the only garment into which she
could throw her girlish coquetry. Her hair was done up on the top of her
head in the manner prescribed by fashion, and she wore the whole raiment
of womankind.
John, when he first saw her reclining in her invalid chair, dressed in
a soft gray ninon gown, a gleam of silk stocking peeping between the
hem and a dainty-shoe, hung back for a second or two from a feeling of
shyness. It was a shock to find that Stella had feet like anybody
else, and very prettily shaped, adorable little feet. It seemed almost
indelicate to look at them, as it would be to inspect too curiously the
end of a mermaid's tail. She held out both hands to greet him, laughing
and blushing.
“How do you like me?” she asked.
The lights of the drawing-room were dim, and the firelight danced
caressingly over her young beauty.
“I 've never seen anything so lovely,” said John, looking at her in
stupid admiration until her eyes dropped in confusion.
“I did n't mean me, you silly Belovedest. I meant my new dress, my
general get-up. Don't you think it's pretty?”
“I do,” said John, fervently.
But what cared he, or what would have cared any man worth the name of
man, for the details of her feminine upholstery, when the revelation of
her complete deliciousness burst upon him? It was then that he realized
her as woman. It was from that moment that she haunted his dreams not as
Stellamaris, star of the sea, child of cloud and mystery, but as a sweet
and palpitating wonder in a marvel of flesh and blood.
Despite dangers, and through the stress of tradition, the Unwritten
Law still prevailed. The episode of the tramp caused her to ask many
questions; but they answered them discreetly. Even when she grew strong
enough to take her active share in the world's doings her life
would still be a sheltered one. Knowledge would come gradually and
unconsciously. Why wantonly give her the shocks of pain? But even a
guarded house and garden could not be the sanctuary of the sea-chamber.
Breaths of evil and sighs of sorrowful things come on the winds of the
earth into most of the habitations of man. The newsboy alone flings into
every household his reeking record of sin. This last did not penetrate
into the sea-chamber; but lying about the rooms, it could not escape a
girl's natural curiosity.
“Young ladies don't read newspapers, dear,” said Lady Blount, asking
Heaven's forgiveness for her lie.
“Why?” A natural question.
“They contain accounts of things which are not fit reading for young
girls.”
Stella pondered over this reason for some time; but one day she said:
“I am no longer a young girl. I am a grown-up woman. I want to know what
the world is like. I hear every one talking of parliament and politics
and foreign countries, and I am ignorant of it all, my dear Exquisite
Auntship. I have a right to know everything about life. You must let me
read the newspapers.”
“Well, wait just a little, dearest,” said Lady Blount.
And the next time John Risca and Walter Herold came down, she took
counsel of them, and they reluctantly agreed that no longer could
the old régime of the Unwritten Law be enforced. Stella must have her
newspaper. Thenceforward, every morning, the portentous package of “The
Times” (none of your sensational half-penny shockers!) was laid upon
Stella's lap, and she read, poor child, the foreign news, and the
leaders, and all the solemn and harmless and unimportant matters in big
print until she yawned her pretty head off, in vast disappointment with
newspapers. It all seemed to her ingenuous mind such a wordy fuss about
nothing. Still, she read conscientiously about tariff reform and naval
armaments and female suffrage and the pronouncements of the German
Emperor and home rule for Ireland, in the puzzled assurance that thereby
she was fitting herself for her future place in the great world.
But one day Lady Blount, going into the pleasant morning room where
Stella now usually had her being, found her sitting with tragic face,
staring out of the window, the decorous “Times” lying a tousled,
crumpled mass on the floor. She was alarmed.
“Darling, what's the matter?”
“Oh, it's hateful! It's unthinkable! Why did n't you tell me that such
things happened nowadays?”
“What things?”
Stella pointed to the outraged organ of British respectability.
“A day or two ago--it 's all true that 's in the newspaper, is n't
it? It's not made up? It all happens?--a day or two ago, while we
were laughing here, a man took a knife and killed his wife and three
children. It's incredible that there can be such monsters in the world.”
“My darling, when you know a little more,” faltered Lady Blount, “you
will learn that there are abnormal people who do these dreadful things
and get reported in the newspapers. But they have nothing to do with us.
You must n't be frightened. We never come across them. Our life is quite
different.”
“But what does that matter?” cried the girl, with agonized eyes. “They
exist. They are among us, whether we happen to meet them or not. They
are like the tramps.”
The world-worn woman, lined and faded, her red hair turned almost gray
now, put her arms around the girl, and sought physically to bring the
comfort that her intelligence was not acute enough to convey in speech.
Stella hid her face against the kind bosom and sobbed.
“Auntie dear, I'm frightened, so frightened!”
“Of what, darling?”
“Of ugliness and wickedness and horror.”
“Nothing of that, dear, can ever come our way. It does n't come the way
of decent folk. People like us don't have anything to do with that side
of life.”
Stella still sobbed. The words brought no conviction. Lady Blount
continued her unenlightened consolation. Let the precious ostrich stick
her head in a bush, and that which she could not see could by no chance
happen.
“But men are out there--” she waved her arm vaguely--“who kill women and
little children.”
“But we never meet the men,” cried poor Lady Blount, insistently. “Our
lives are free from all that.”
She preached her narrow gospel. There was a class of beings in the
world who did all kinds of ferocious, criminal, cruel, mean, and vulgar
things; but they were a class apart. In the world in which she herself
and Stella and John and Walter dwelt all was beauty and refinement.
Stella dried her eyes. At one-and-twenty one cannot weep forever. She
allowed herself to be half persuaded of the truth of her Aunt Julia's
sophistries. But the little, impish devil who stage-manages the comedies
of life arranged a day or two afterward a sardonic situation.
It was the mildest of December mornings. Old Autumn humped a brave and
kindly shoulder against Winter's onrush. A faint south-west wind crept
warmly over the Channel, and sweet odours came from the moist, unsmitten
earth. A pale sun clothed the nakedness of the elms and chestnuts in
the garden, and brightened to early spring beauty the laurels and firs.
Stella, with Constable near by, sat in the sunshine, by the ivy-clad
north-eastern front of the old Channel House, and her chair was beneath
the window of the morning-room. Now that she could sit upright, she
had learned to use her hands in many ways. She could knit. She was
knitting now, vaguely and tremulously hoping that the result might be a
winter waistcoat for her Great High Belovedest, intent on her counting,
one, two, three, four, pearl one, when suddenly voices in altercation
broke upon her ear.
It was merely an unhappy, ignoble quarrel such as for many years had
marred that house of sweet-seeming. Fierce hatred and uncharitableness
were unchained and sped their clamorous and disastrous way. Bitter words
uttered in strident and unnatural tones wounded the quiet air. The
woman lost her dignity in vain recrimination. The man snarled savage
and common oaths. Suddenly the door slammed violently, and there was the
silence of death. The scene had lasted only a few moments. Sir Oliver,
in his foolish anger, had evidently followed his wife into the morning
room and left her abruptly. But the few moments were enough for Stella,
who had heard everything. Her heart seemed frost-bitten, and her blood
turned to ice.
The cruel, vulgar, and hideous things of life were not the appanages of
a class apart. They entered into her own narrowed world. Her beautiful
world! Her hateful, horrible terror of a world!